I still can't believe this story. Unbelievable also to think that people - including his mother, knew immediately it was this guy who had done it. Now, he's in solitary confinement as even all the prisoners are wanting to murder him!Now maybe the USA will think about gun laws. A lot of his ammo was bought online!

Batman cinema shooting: killer said he was 'The Joker'Like everyone else inside screen 9 of the Century 16 cinema, Jessica Ghawi could hardly contain her excitement as she waited for a midnight premiere of the latest Batman epic, The Dark Knight Rises.

Ghawi, who tweeted under the name Jessica Redfield, spent part of her final hours on Twitter describing her excitement at seeing the new Batman film By Gordon Rayner, Mark Hughes in New York and Nick Allen in Denver10:22PM BST 20 Jul 2012After waiting for months to see what was tipped to become the most successful film of all time, the 24-year-old sports journalist passed the time by teasing a friend via her Twitter account, saying: “You aren’t seeing it tonight?! … Loser!”She was so desperate for the film to begin that she even tweeted her frustration, writing in capitals: “Movie doesn’t start for 20 minutes.” In a staff car park at the back of the cinema, James Eagan Holmes, a medical school drop-out, 24, was also counting down the minutes to an evening for which he, too, had spent weeks getting ready.While many children inside the cinema had come dressed as Batman, Holmes had painted his hair red and, when arrested, told police he was the comic book hero’s nemesis, The Joker.

He had armed himself with four guns and tear gas canisters as he prepared to storm the multiplex in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado, determined to kill as many people as he could. Half an hour after the film began, Miss Ghawi and 11 others were dead or dying after Holmes carried out America’s latest mass shooting, silently and indiscriminately targeting men, women, children and even a four-month-old baby. “Every few seconds it was just boom, boom, boom,” said Jennifer Seeger, who was in the theatre. “He would reload and shoot and anyone who would try to leave would just get killed.”RELATED ARTICLESThrough tears, Patricia Legarreta, 25, described how she was hit in the leg as she escaped with her daughter Azariah, four, and four-month-old Ethan.She said: “He [the killer] was heading towards my daughter. Had I not moved I don’t know what would have happened to her. It was horrible, so scary. A pain went through my ankle and up my leg.”Her partner, Jamie Rohrs, 25, jumped 20ft from a balcony with Ethan in his arms. He said: “I thought he was going to shoot the baby so I just jumped over the side. There were gunshots flashing to my right and people were falling, it was like a dream.”Holmes, who dropped out of a neuroscience PhD at the University of Colorado School of Medicine last month, shot 71 people, including at least one person in an adjacent cinema who was hit as the bullets penetrated the walls.The 250-seater cinema was packed with families and high school students.When Holmes was arrested outside the cinema, he told police: “I’m The Joker.” Ray Kelly, the commissioner of New York police, who was kept updated by his colleagues in Colorado, said: “It clearly looks like a deranged individual. He had his hair painted red, he said he was The Joker, obviously the enemy of Batman.”Police are trying to ascertain whether Holmes was acting out one of the anarchic, bloody attacks carried out by The Joker in Batman films and comics. In one Dark Knight comic, The Joker kills an entire late-night television audience with gas. In the same comic, a deranged loner carries out a mass shooting in an adult movie cinema and the Batman video game, Arkham City, is set in an abandoned cinema.Some witnesses also said the gunman burst into the cinema during a scene in which members of the public are killed during an attack on Gotham City’s stock exchange.Holmes, who is originally from San Diego, California, told police he had left explosives at his flat five miles away. Bomb disposal experts, who went in through a window, found a booby trap consisting of a “very sophisticated” system of fluid-filled bottles and tripwires rigged to explode if the front door was opened.Holmes’s parents, Arlene and Robert, released a statement saying: “Our hearts go out to those who were involved in this tragedy”, but offering no clues as to why their son had carried out the attack.Holmes had no criminal convictions apart from a speeding offence last year and is not thought to have been affiliated to any terrorist groups.One report suggested that he is an extremist anti-capitalist protester who may have attacked the audience because of the film’s predicted £1 billion box office takings, or because he was unhappy with its negative portrayal of protests against big business.John Hickenlooper, the Colorado governor, said the shootings were “the act of an apparently very deranged mind”. Although Holmes believed himself to be The Joker, a character from a previous Batman film, some witnesses at first believed he had come dressed as Bane, the villain of The Dark Knight Rises, played by Tom Hardy. Holmes was wearing black body armour, a gas mask and helmet, like Bane.After seeing the gunman burst into the cinema via an emergency exit, many cinema-goers thought he was a prankster acting out a scene from the film. The fact that many Batman fans had come in fancy dress only added to the confusion.Paul Otermat, who was in the auditorium, said: “Front right there was an emergency exit and a man walked through there … I thought it was some sort of publicity stunt for a second.“He threw tear gas over the crowd and as soon as he threw it I could feel it in my eye.” Miss Seeger added: “It was mass chaos. He threw in the gas can, and then I knew it was real.”Sitting in the second row, Miss Seeger was among the first to be picked out by Holmes, who aimed his gun at her face.“I was just a deer in headlights. I didn’t know what to do,” she said. She ducked as Holmes shot people sitting behind her. “There were bullet [casings] just falling on my head,” she said.“I told my friend, 'We’ve got to get out of here,’ but then he shot people trying to go out the exits.”She said she began crawling towards an exit when she saw a girl aged about 14 “lying lifeless on the stairs”. She saw a man with a bullet wound in his back and tried to check his pulse, but “I had to go. I was going to get shot”.The 6ft 3ins gunman, armed with a Remington pump action shotgun, an AR15 assault rifle and two Glock handguns, made his way up the aisle, shooting as he went, saying nothing.Miss Ghawi, who was with her friend, Brent Lowak, was among those who ducked down behind the seats to take cover. Weeks earlier she had escaped another mass shooting, in which a man was killed and seven injured in a shopping mall in Toronto on June 2.Describing what happened to her, her brother Jordan wrote on his blog that her friend had tried to dial 911, but “Brent then heard Jessica scream and noticed that she was struck by a round in the leg”. As he tried to put pressure on the wound and keep her calm, he, too, was shot, in the leg, and then “noticed that Jessica was no longer screaming”. She had been shot in the head. Nearby, Chandler Brannon, 25, escaped by playing dead.He said: “Me and my girlfriend ducked down behind the chairs with a lot of other people … we stayed down behind the chairs because we were afraid to get up and we played dead.“We could hear screaming and chairs being broken around us so we just figured we would stay down. There were about 50 to 75 gunshots, we were playing dead for about 45 seconds or a minute. After that was over someone said he was gone. I helped a guy down the stairs and one guy had been shot in the head. It was just crazy.”Among the injured was a four-month-old baby, who was well enough to be allowed home from hospital yesterday, and children aged as young as six.“I saw one girl covered in blood,” said Alex Milano. “I don’t know whose little girl that was, but my heart goes out to them. A cop came walking through the front door … holding a little girl in his arms and she wasn’t moving.”Tanner Coon, who was in the cinema with a friend and the friend’s 12-year-old brother, said the gunman fired off a volley of rounds, then there was a pause and a “period of quietness when everybody started running out”.He said: “I slipped on some blood and landed on a lady. I shook her and said we need to go. There was no response so I presume she was dead.”Other witnesses reported seeing Holmes begin the shooting spree with his shotgun, and once it was empty he calmly dropped it to the floor, grabbed a rifle strapped to his back and went on firing, then later used the pistols.He began building up his arsenal in May, buying his guns legally from two shops. Mobile phone footage taken in the cinema lobby showed survivors, many of them in bloodstained clothes, screaming and crying as they fled.As police officers arriving on the scene they used their patrol cars to ferry the injured to hospitals. Holmes offered no resistance as he was arrested next to his Hyundai car in the car park.The Aurora police chief, Dan Oates, said Holmes talked about “possible explosives in his residence”. When police got to his third-floor flat they removed the window and found the booby trap Holmes had left for them.“His apartment is booby-trapped with various incendiary and chemical devices and tripwires,” he said, adding that it may take days to defuse the devices.The massacre was the worst mass shooting in the US since the 2007 Virginia Tech campus killing, in which 32 people died. Just 13 miles from the cinema is Columbine High School, where two students killed 12 classmates and a teacher in 1999.Holmes began his neuroscience course in June last year, but dropped out last month, without giving a reason. When he began renting his flat, he described himself on the application as “quiet and easy-going”.Aurora is home to a large satellite intelligence operation at Buckley Air Force Base and the Pentagon confirmed members of the US armed forces were among those injured.In the UK, where the film opened with early morning screenings yesterday co-ordinated with its midnight release in the US, the Odeon cinema chain said it was stepping up security, including bag checks, at its premises. In Paris the film’s French premiere, which had been due to take place last night, was cancelled. The cast, including the British-born star, Christian Bale, pulled out of publicity interviews immediately.President Barack Obama said he was saddened by the “horrific and tragic” shooting and he cut short electoral campaigning to return to the White House, where he faced inevitable calls for a tightening of gun laws.Tributes were last night paid to Miss Ghawi, who was trying to get a career in television. Jesse Spector, the friend she had been tweeting moments before the shooting, said: “Words are useless. Guns more so. If you ever had any interaction with Jessica, you know the world is much worse off without her.”After escaping the Toronto shooting on June 2, Miss Ghawi had written of: “An odd feeling which led me to go outside and unknowingly out of harm’s way. It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around how a weird feeling saved me from being in the middle of a deadly shooting.“I say all the time that every moment we have to live our life is a blessing. Every hug from a family member. Every laugh we share with friends. Even the times of solitude are all blessings. Every second of every day is a gift.”

Jayel wrote: Now maybe the USA will think about gun laws. A lot of his ammo was bought online!

Nope, it won't. It didn't happen after Columbine, or the nut case who was shooting people at gas stations in Washington, or the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords, or the massacre of students at Virginia Tech--and on and on and on.

Some states do have strict gun laws, like my state, New Jersey. But a national response of restrcting access to guns (and ammunition) is not going to happen as long as The National Rifle Association (NRA) remains powerful and has the Republican Party in its hip pocket, and the Democratic Party scared of its power. People who oppose guns get targeted by the NRA for defeat when they come up for re-election. That wouldn't mean much in a place like New Jersey, because the NRA isn't strong here. But in states where they are strong, it can mean defeat, because the NRA has a lot of money and they can pour that money into any district to help defeat anyone who goes up against them. Most politicians find it easier to just leave the gun issue alone.

There are also a lot of Americans who misread the US Constitution and think it guarantees them the right to have any guns they want anytime they want--and no one can do anything about it. "My second amendment right..." blah blah blah. Sure, because everyone needs semi-automatic weapons, a handgun, and a couple of rifles in their apartment--just in case.

Don't get me wrong. There are political leaders who have worked on restricting guns for many years, and some states have passed their own restrictive laws. But I don't think anything major is going to happen on the federal level as long as the gun lobby has the power it does today.

This guy apparently bought 6000 rounds of ammo. If it was all from the same company, how come no one from the company thought it was odd that one person would need so much ammo? Or maybe one person wanting 6000 rounds of ammo is not that unusual?

I wonder why there apparently were quite a few kids at the midnight screening? The movie is rated M in Australia, not sure if it's different in the US. But I'm sure it is a movie not recommended for young kids to see.

I guess it's hard to find a babysitter for your kids who will come just before midnight or come earlier and stay the night so you can go without the kids to the midnight screening. Babies might just sleep through the movie, but then only if they're used to sleeping in very noisy surroundings (movies can be so LOUD, especially when it comes to scenes with explosions). A little 6 year old girl was killed, and one article I read stated a couple who were injured bought their four year old kid and a baby.

Four year olds and six year olds would have not much interest in this movie. Perhaps the parents thought as it's midnight the kids will be sleepy and sleep through the movie. But what if they didn't (if there had been no shooting) and saw some of the movie? Then you have kids with nightmares.

I wonder why the cinema allowed all these parents with kids in? More interested in profit than anything else?

Tony: "I'm not getting any reception. How about you?"Ziva: "I'm braless"Tony: "I noticed that earlier. But on your phone, they're called 'bars'"

couch_potato wrote:I wonder why there apparently were quite a few kids at the midnight screening? The movie is rated M in Australia, not sure if it's different in the US. But I'm sure it is a movie not recommended for young kids to see.

Its because the parents of this generation are fail into understanding the responsibility of being a parent

couch_potato wrote:This guy apparently bought 6000 rounds of ammo. If it was all from the same company, how come no one from the company thought it was odd that one person would need so much ammo? Or maybe one person wanting 6000 rounds of ammo is not that unusual?

His apartment took 2 days to be cleared of all the booby traps he set so you would think he'd be smarter than to buy all that much ammo from the one company. This guy planned the whole thing out not to be stopped before he acted out his strange fantasy and no one stood a chance.

I was waiting - and it finally arrived by way of a CNN guest - that a nutjob would blame video games for a tragedy yet again.

When will people like that stop making excuses and start facing the fact that some people are pure evil?

RIP to the people who have died and my thoughts are with their family and friends is all I can say.

Jayel wrote: Now maybe the USA will think about gun laws. A lot of his ammo was bought online!

Nope, it won't. It didn't happen after Columbine, or the nut case who was shooting people at gas stations in Washington, or the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords, or the massacre of students at Virginia Tech--and on and on and on.

Some states do have strict gun laws, like my state, New Jersey. But a national response of restrcting access to guns (and ammunition) is not going to happen as long as The National Rifle Association (NRA) remains powerful and has the Republican Party in its hip pocket, and the Democratic Party scared of its power. People who oppose guns get targeted by the NRA for defeat when they come up for re-election. That wouldn't mean much in a place like New Jersey, because the NRA isn't strong here. But in states where they are strong, it can mean defeat, because the NRA has a lot of money and they can pour that money into any district to help defeat anyone who goes up against them. Most politicians find it easier to just leave the gun issue alone.

There are also a lot of Americans who misread the US Constitution and think it guarantees them the right to have any guns they want anytime they want--and no one can do anything about it. "My second amendment right..." blah blah blah. Sure, because everyone needs semi-automatic weapons, a handgun, and a couple of rifles in their apartment--just in case.

Don't get me wrong. There are political leaders who have worked on restricting guns for many years, and some states have passed their own restrictive laws. But I don't think anything major is going to happen on the federal level as long as the gun lobby has the power it does today.

Just after I posted that there was something on the TV last night when they discussed this with someone in America and they said exactly the same, that it would change nothing! Crazy!

Jayel wrote: Just after I posted that there was something on the TV last night when they discussed this with someone in America and they said exactly the same, that it would change nothing! Crazy!

Crazy--and then some. I have been frustrated for years by the insane attachment to guns some people in this country have, and the fact that we can't seem to get some strong gun control legislation passed even after these mass shootings. But as long as our elected officials remain almost totally dependent on private funding for elections, and who can give that money is unrestricted, the gun lobby will be able to buy members of Congress who will protect their interests. We need public financing of elections in order to have any hope of getting a handle on this problem.

Fringedweller wrote: It's worse than that. The gun lovers will wheel up the argument again that the massacre would not have happened if the cinema goers had been armed themselves.

I was talking with a friend of mine about that very thing earlier today. Imagine that. Dozens of people in the theater packing heat. So instead of one insane person shooting, as soon as he starts firing, a dozen or so other panicky people whip out their weapons and bullets are flying in all directions--people firing wildly into the dark, people getting caught in the crossfire. Yeah, all we need is MORE people with guns.

couch_potato wrote:I wonder why there apparently were quite a few kids at the midnight screening? The movie is rated M in Australia, not sure if it's different in the US. But I'm sure it is a movie not recommended for young kids to see.

Its because the parents of this generation are fail into understanding the responsibility of being a parent

Refer to pic->

The youngest victim was a 6yo ... Wtf was a 6yo doing at this film, at this hour? There was also a 4month old baby there. What? No babysitters in that town?

CONDEMNED - I'm interested in the "Fail" pic ... what's the point? Am I being super naive/showing my age/blind??? I don't get it ... (as the mum of an 18yo daughter I thought I was pretty "with it" and hardened towards their crass displays, so any help appreciated! ).